Rough justice

In an interview to a magazine supplement, Bollywood actor John Abraham, who is perhaps better known for his impressive musculature than his intellectual acuity, said that if the government did not take prompt action to prevent the increasing incidence of violent sexual attacks on women, the public would have no recourse but to start lynching rapists. That a showbiz celebrity and a popular role model for young men should make such a public statement, which could be interpreted as an incitement to mob violence and vigilantism, shows the intensity of the repugnance and shame caused by recurrent cases of rapes that have focussed international attention of India’s entrenched and systemic brutal maltreatment of its women, of which sexual assault is only one symptom.

The savagery of the attack on the victim, who has been iconised as Nirbhaya, has provoked a visceral reaction across civil society, many spokespeople of which have demanded various forms of rough and ready justice for rapists, the rougher and readier the better. The Justice Verma panel has deemed that it was not advisable to lower the cut-off age for juvenile offenders from 18 to 16, or to make the death penalty mandatory for rape. This seems to have further fuelled popular anger at our polity’s seemingly utter helplessness in de-stigmatising the Indian republic as one of the world’s most conspicuous violators of women’s rights.

After World War II, when the atrocities of the Nazi holocaust came to light, the German people were saddled with the moral burden of what was called ‘collective responsibility': no adult German could escape complicity in the genocide of Jews and other minorities on the grounds that they were unaware of what was happening to their neighbours. A similar sense of collective responsibility, tantamount to a feeling of collective guilt, seems to be spreading among the more gender-sensitised sections of Indian male society. The sharper the sense of guilt and shame, the harsher the penance ordained for its expiation.

That they have inherited and continue to participate, willy-nilly, in a patriarchal system viciously skewed in disfavour of the female, evokes a feeling of guilt and shame among a growing number of Indian men. This could explain the strident calls for lynch mobs and the public hanging of rapists, for chemical or surgical castration.

It is as though, in order to exorcise the demon of rape, and with it exorcise a sense of guilt, we seek to make retributive justice assume a form as violent and demonic as the crime it is meant to punish. While understandable, such gut reactions to any violent crime — particularly the most repugnant of crimes called rape — can only contribute to a further brutalisation of society.

It is what provokes such reactions which is significant: the growing sense of collective responsibility, of collective complicity. It is not just the rapist who is guilty of rape: in a way, and to an extent, we all are who, however unwillingly or unwittingly, are stakeholders in a society which over millennia has systematically conspired in the often violent debasement of women, of which rape is only one manifestation.

It’s not only the criminals who violate women who are in the dock. In a collective sense, so are all of us. And the rage we feel towards them is a reflection of the rage we cannot bear to feel towards ourselves.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Author

A former associate editor with the Times of India, Jug Suraiya writes two regular columns for the print edition, Jugular Vein, which appears every Friday, and Second Opinion, which appears on Wednesdays. He also writes the script for three cartoon strips. Two are in collaboration with Ajit Ninan, Like That Only which appears twice a week on Wednesday and Saturday and Power Point which appears on the Edit page of Times of India every Thursday. He also does a joint daily cartoon strip which appears online in collaboration with Partho Sengupta. His blog takes a contrarian view of topical and timeless issues, political, social, economic and speculative.

A former associate editor with the Times of India, Jug Suraiya writes two regular columns for the print edition, Jugular Vein, which appears every Friday, a. . .